New rules enacted by the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
will require lenders to gather and
report a greater range of data
starting next year under the Home
Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA).
Although the data won’t need to be
reported to the CFPB until 2019, experts recommend that lenders start
preparing this year for the expanded HMDA requirements. Lenders
must collect data across four new
information categories, explains
Barbara Boccia, senior director at
the financial services consulting
company Wolters Kluwer.

Within each category are more than
100 data points that could be collected under the new system, Boccia
explains. The four categories, she
says, include data about the applicant, including their credit score and
debt-to-income ratio; data about the
property securing the loan, such as
the construction method or property value; information about the
features of the loan, such as the loan
term and interest rate; and unique
identifiers, such as the property address and loan-originator identifiers.
It’s important to prepare ahead of
time, Boccia says. “[Lenders should]
focus on system changes needed
to collect the data fields, and then
on testing those collection systems
before 2018,” she says. (S W)